'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

From Russia With Love / Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War

Donald Trump Russian Deal | Rachel Maddow | MSNBChttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX8dgbr5EI8NB: If this investigative report by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC (see link above) is not a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, then its something even more sinister. After decades of instigating 'regime change' in other countries, it looks as though someone pushed through regime change in the US of A. Nemesis is the word that comes to mind. And the article below indicates that a full-scale civil war is unfolding in the highest echelons of the American state apparatus. This is reminiscent of the last days of the USSR. We can only hope that it is not accompanied by violence - DS

In April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the
K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”- aktivniye
meropriyatiya - against the re-ëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan.
Unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets,
active measures aim at influencing events—at undermining a rival power with
forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold
War. The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist.
According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-ranking K.G.B.
officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain, Soviet intelligence
tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National
Committees, popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!,” and discredit the
President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex. The effort
had no evident effect. Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states.

Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold
War. In the nineteen-sixties, Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that
the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that American intelligence had
“created” the aids virus, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They regularly
lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies. The C.I.A., for its part,
worked to overthrow regimes in Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, and Panama. It
used cash payments, propaganda, and sometimes violent measures to sway
elections away from leftist parties in Italy, Guatemala, Indonesia, South
Vietnam, and Nicaragua. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early
nineties, the C.I.A. asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread
disinformation that could harm the U.S. Russia promised to do so. But when
Sergey Tretyakov, the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York,
defected, in 2000, he revealed that Moscow’s active measures had never
subsided. “Nothing has changed,” he wrote, in 2008. “Russia is doing everything
it can today to embarrass the U.S.”

Vladimir Putin, who is quick to accuse the West of
hypocrisy, frequently points to this history. He sees a straight line from the
West’s support of the anti-Moscow “color revolutions,” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan,
and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders, to its endorsement of
the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.
“She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,”
Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State
Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation.)
He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the
National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International,
and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of
regime change.

The U.S. officials who administer the system that Putin sees
as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “whataboutism,”
a strategy of false moral equivalences. Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy
national-security adviser under President Obama, is among those who reject
Putin’s logic, but he said, “Putin is not entirely wrong,” adding that, in the
past, “we engaged in regime change around the world. There is just enough rope
for him to hang us.”*

The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of
keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions
against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of
eastern Ukraine. (Russian state television derided Obama as “weak,”
“uncivilized,” and a “eunuch.”) Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse—the
embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more
hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing
Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump,
who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and
effectiveness as a leader. As early as 2007, Trump declared that Putin was
“doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia
period.” In 2013, before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Trump
wondered, in a tweet, if he would meet Putin, and, “if so, will he become my
new best friend?” During the Presidential campaign, Trump delighted in saying
that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a
“laughingstock.”

For those interested in active measures, the digital age
presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of
Andropov. The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what
cybersecurity experts call a large “attack surface.” Tied into politics at the
highest level, they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to
sensitive government institutions. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary
Clinton’s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton’s, had every
reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications. As a senior
counsellor in the Obama White House, he was involved in digital policy. Yet
even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense, two-step
verification, for his e-mail account…. Read more: